


Cautionary Tales for Incautious Children

by jaythenerdkid



Category: Doctor Who
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2010-09-20
Updated: 2010-09-20
Packaged: 2017-10-12 01:08:17
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,497
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/119119
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/jaythenerdkid/pseuds/jaythenerdkid
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>A guide to fairytales (and how to interpret them) for the clever and discerning child or child-at-heart.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Cautionary Tales for Incautious Children

**Author's Note:**

> This story was originally posted at Dreamwidth and crossposted to my LiveJournal.
> 
> "[x] is something that happens to other people" was taken from Good Omens, by Terry Pratchett and Neil Gaiman.

Once upon a time --

No. Let me start again.

On a dark and stormy night --

Except that that isn't right either. Only fantasists and film producers think that the weather will coincide with their narrative whims. Stories do not begin once upon a time, and they do not begin whenever it is most dramatic for them to do so. No, they begin when they begin, and then they continue because narrative inertia is just as powerful a force as the other kind.

It was a relatively normal day when this story chose to begin, but that was soon to change.

***

There is a legend about a man - a noble, nameless warrior, famed for his courage and daring. In fact, there are many legends about him, spoken in many tongues on many planets in many galaxies. In a universe made of fairytales, he is the handsome but nameless hero. Close your eyes and picture him as he rides to the rescue on his white charger - eyes dark with purpose, clothes flapping in the wind. He is the handsome prince from every fairytale, come to save his princess from certain doom. Perhaps there is an evil monster involved, or a wicked witch, or a nasty queen consumed by jealousy. Perhaps his princess is not a princess at all, but some other girl of indisputable virtue and inhuman beauty. Perhaps she is standing at her tower window right now, sighing dramatically. Some day, her prince will come. That is how stories work.

Perhaps this is a good time to mention that those stories are all lies. You shouldn't believe everything your parents tell you, you know, _especially_ when there are happy endings involved.

***

There are other legends. Your parents will not have told you these, judging them far too dark and gory for consumption by children. But perhaps you have memories - vague, scattered ones, obscured by the fog of childhood - of stories your parents told other parents, late at night whilst they thought you were asleep. Those were stories of blood and fire and war and death and suffering, stories that made your heart race and your blood turn cold. Perhaps you lay awake in bed after your parents finally caught you eavesdropping and sent you back to your room, those fragments of fractured fairytale spinning around and around in your mind.

If you were a clever child, you would have realised that _those_ stories - the scary ones, the bloody ones, the stories of chaos and madness - were the truth, or as close to it as a story can get. Perhaps you wondered why the grown-ups kept all the true stories for themselves and fed you the candy-coated lies instead. If you were a _very_ clever child, maybe you realised that this was because grown-ups are selfish when it comes to the truth.

You shouldn't believe everything your parents tell you - but sometimes, it is a good idea to believe the things they think you shouldn't know.

***

The truest legends aren't told at all, but perhaps if you are very lucky (or very unlucky), you will see them being written before your eyes.

***

The stories are right about one thing - there really is a man. Right now, on this deceptively innocuous-looking day, he is sitting at a table in a cafe on a planet you've never visited on the other side of the universe from where you are. He is drinking tea. Some things are constant. His companion is drinking coffee from a blue mug with cheerful yellow flowers painted on it. Her hair is very, very red, redder than a sunset, and when the sun shines on it through the grimy cafe window, it blazes orange.

The man is wearing a bowtie. This is a new development. It is probably an improvement over the jumper with question marks all over it or the scarf of many colours or the cricketing uniform or that multicoloured coat he once wore, all when he was a much younger man. The man is also wearing a tweed jacket that looks as though it has seen better days. He is the sort of man whom one might suspect is wearing braces underneath the jacket to hold up his trousers, being of the general opinion that belts are something that happen to other people.

He is not a man at all, actually, but he is very good at pretending. He's been pretending for the greater part of a thousand years. Sometimes he forgets how to pretend properly, but that is all right, because it is astonishing what people's brains won't notice. Once you get the general shape right, you can get away with almost anything.

His companion isn't a man either, but then, she isn't pretending to be.

If you could see them, drinking human beverages on this alien planet that you didn't even know existed, would you think they were the stuff of legend? Would you look at the pretend man in his jacket and bowtie and the girl with her hair and her coffee mug and think that they were heroes?

Of course not. You listened to far too many stories as a child. You don't know what a hero looks like.

You also don't know what a villain looks like. You'd do well to remedy that. It might save your life some day.

***

On some planets, he is a hero. On some, he is not.

The Daleks - a race of mutant supremacists whom you have thankfully probably never met personally - call him The Oncoming Storm. It is not a compliment. He has destroyed their planet more than once, though in all fairness to him, they probably deserved it.

To the Sontarans, he is their ancient and greatest enemy. In their strange way, that _is_ a compliment, as the Sontarans consider a worthy enemy far more valuable than a worthless ally. For this reason, they have many enemies and not all that many friends.

Even his own people didn't like him much, for all that they used him - as a pawn, a toy, a saviour, a final solution - whenever they saw fit. Not that it matters much, these days. They're gone, wiped out forever, so thoroughly that most people think they never even existed. Some of them used to worship him - or rather, they worshipped what he used to be - but even that is gone now. If he's still a god, he's a very lonely one. The Lonely God. It's the sort of thing someone old and tired might call themselves before realising that it sounds a bit silly.

He destroyed them anyway. He was never one for feeling homesick.

***

If you were to see him now, you wouldn't recognise him. He is no longer in the cafe; he is standing before an army, his hands flailing as he speaks to them in a language that you have most likely never heard. Since you can't understand his words, you couldn't possibly know that this entreaty is in fact a threat.

Many things have happened since that cafe.

He looks so sad, standing there, doesn't he? The girl from before is standing next to him, and yet, he still looks so alone. One man against an army. In the stories your parents read you, he would never have a chance.

The thing about your parents' stories, though, is that their heroes always played fair.

His entreaties have failed, or so we must surmise from the droop of his shoulders, the failed stoicism of a man who knows that what he is about to do will not sit well on his conscience. We will stop here, because the details of what he must do are not important. When we start again, he is in his timeship, his companion by his side, and they are watching as a planet is engulfed in flames.

It was a rather good cafe, too. Finest tea on this side of the universe. Some sacrifices lack blood and death, but they are still just as painful.

***

Sometimes he is a hero, and sometimes, he is not.

In one version of this story, he is the man who was forced to desperate measures to save a galaxy you've never heard of from a terrible, alien threat. Nothing excuses violence, but sometimes, one can justify it. Many heroes have slain dragons. This was just a rather larger class of dragon. He just used a rather larger class of sword.

Nobody will ever hear the other story, of the terrible god who descended from the heavens and wreaked his mighty, bloody vengeance upon an entire species because he decided he had the right. He is not the hero of that story, which is just as well for him, because everyone who might have told it is gone.

The reason you do not know what a villain looks like is that they are very good at clearing up the evidence.

***

Once upon a time --

No. That's not right.

One deceptively normal day --

\-- The universe changed.


End file.
